Here's the description of "registry patch" which should 100% work with win 8x-10x unless you have some special problems with video drivers:
http://forum.ja2.su/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?board=no;action=display;num=1440878146
Use google translate if needed.

Ok, I think I bring good news towards Windows 10 with 7435 and update. I have played for a bit over 3 hours with no faults now.
I have talked to Miguel, Carlos, Ira, taken over the airport. Talked to several AIM members through the website.
I also loaded an old save from my windows 7 machine, and continued from there a bit, talking to NPC's and a few battles. No problems.

Here is how I got it running:

First I also got a black screen i fullscreen mode. Then I changed to windowed mode, and i changed the compability of ja2.exe:
Run in XP sp3 mode.
Reduced color 16 bit
Run as admin.

I also set win 98 compabitly mode to true in the INI editor. (Might not be needed).

Now I got in the game, but I kept getting "Assertion error" or something similar.
Then I added the three DLL files from the "win8 fix".
ddraw.dll, libwine.dll and wined3d.dll and put them in my JA2 directory.

Now it runs perfectly, both in windowed mode and in fullscreen.

However, as Win 10 isn't letting me play this game smoothly (gamebreaking frequent crashes despite win 8 fixes), I'll probably not get around to actually seeing him for quite a while.

Considering going back to Win 7 but I didn't bring my Win 7 install disk when I moved back to Canada, and many of the things that weren't working right away (sound, webcam, etc.) are working now, so JA2 alone is probably not going to be enough reason for me to get my hands on an install disc, etc.

But who knows, maybe the win 10 issues resolve themselves with JA2 as well, and then I'll have this dude!

Julian

Julix wrote on Sun, 06 December 2015 12:46

However, as Win 10 isn't letting me play this game smoothly (gamebreaking frequent crashes despite win 8 fixes)

Try registry fix, restore original DLLs, disable intro in ja2.ini.

That's what I meant by win8 fixes. Intro needed to be disabled to even get into the game... I added .DLL files out of that folder, is that what you mean by "restore originals? -- I did the registry thing that's in the documents folder called "Windows Compatibility Fixes" - though I'm not consistently setting the affinity to only 1 CPU core. Didn't manage to get the shortcut to work.

I added .DLL files out of that folder, is that what you mean by "restore originals?

I just found the setting in the INI where you can press and hold NUMLOCK to get it to get rid of the clock!

;----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------
; Skip global strategic events (use to prevent game crashes). Press and hold NUMLOCK to skip.
;----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------

ENABLE_EMERGENCY_BUTTON_NUMLOCK_TO_SKIP_STRATEGIC_EVENTS = FALSE